Matt Taibbi Is Taking A Break From The Things He Loves

It wasn't too long ago that when faced with a nonconfrontational line of questioning, but one he nevertheless did not appreciate as it dared to do anything but revere him for the hero he is, that Matt Taibbi's go-to move was to throw a scalding hot cup of coffee in the face of his offender. When he had more time to plan his attack, it was extracting semen from horse, storing it in his refrigerator for weeks, baking it into a pie and then smashing it in the face of some nameless asshole. Does he currently have a vat of jizz sitting in his kitchen, ready and waiting for anyone who might offer an unfavorable review of his upcoming book, Griftopia, out November 2? Allegedly, no. In fact, Taibbi says over the course of his interview with the Observer to promote the new tome, he's pretty much done with that and all the other stuff that's come to made him tick over the last 40 years. Here is a list of things Taibbi claims to be giving up for at least the short-term (though don't hold him to it):

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* Using drugs to get the creative juices flowing (In 2005...he wrote a New York Press column called "The 52 Funniest Things about the Upcoming Death of the Pope," which, a week later, he said had been written in a Vicodin haze. "I'm too old for that shit now," he says..."I think he's in a different place in his life," Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana says. "Writing about credit default swaps probably doesn't lend itself to wearing Viking suits and taking acid.")

* The throwing offensive items in people's faces when they least expect it bit ("I've just calmed down a lot," he told the NYO of the coffee "incident.")

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* Being mistaken for a pedophile ("...he came home and worked in a private-detective agency called Dataquest International, run by a former Army man named Russ Bubas. "Once we had a job where we were trying to see if someone was stealing from the Stride Rite shoe company," Mr. Taibbi said. "I parked outside their factory, waiting to tail him, and I didn't realize I'd parked next to the company day-care center, where little kids were playing. They thought I was a pedophile. I was sitting in this old Oldsmobile. They alerted the whole company." [NB: He didn't actually say he was giving this one up, so the assumption may be premature on our part.])

* Writing about Wall Street using 'fiction-writing technique' ("Literarily, in order to sell people on a lot of the subject matter, it just works better when you make a villain, like a James Bond-style villain, out of Goldman Sachs, and you almost use fiction-writing technique to sell the story," he says.)

* Writing about Wall Street period. (Mr. Taibbi said he has one more Rolling Stone finance piece coming before he takes a recess. "Then I'm going to be doing some different things. I'll come back to it," he said. "Sometimes the best gift you can give to your readers is your absence, and I think I've kind of hit this as hard as I can possibly hit this, for a while.")

The next hedge fund manager to invest in Apple gets a horse semen pie to the face. ...all those super-rich people who turned to hedge funds with their millions in the hopes that bunches of Whiz-Kids from Wharton and Harvard and Yale would find unseen and wildly creative investment ideas to fatten their fortunes – all those rich clients are actually finding out now that those same Whiz Kids are buying Apple just like the rest of us [...] Jesus. After all that craziness in the last decade or so, after MF and the London Whale and all that nuttiness, this is what it comes down to? These guys are buying Apple? Couldn't we have just started off doing that and saved ourselves all that trouble? [...] Someday we'll get back to the time when the really smart guys from the best schools went to work for companies that built actual products, engineered more efficient cars, cured diseases, etc. Because it seems like our best minds kind of suck at investing. More Evidence That Wall Street Is Overpaid [TAIBBLOG]